Behind her, the two FBI men descended the ladder and began a search of their own. Mindful of Mike’s instructions, she tried to keep an eye on them while still concentrating on the task at hand. Her initial impression of Special Agents Ferriss and Cooper seemed to validate Mike’s concerns. The two men’s “search” consisted of a single walk around the circumference of the ancient room, where they glanced with apparent disinterest at the rotting wooden tables and chairs, and then confined their investigation mostly to the area that had been exposed by Melton’s equipment.
Sharon did her best to ignore their shoddy work habits, dedicating herself to her search despite having no idea what she might be looking for. She briefly considered coming right out and asking them what their game was, since neither special agent was acting anything like a trained investigator, then abandoned the idea as pointless. If they hadn’t told Mike what they were up to, they certainly weren’t going to confide in her.
After less than an hour, the agents climbed back up the ladder and out of the hole, presumably for a smoke break. She heard the men talking in hushed voices but could not make out their words. A few minutes later they returned, still doing little apparent investigating. Sharon continued her methodical search.
An hour later, she had covered nearly half of the room but found nothing that would indicate what its purpose might have been or why two (or possibly three) people had died in it. Her two FBI companions had by now given up any pretense of investigating and spent most of their time staring at her with unnerving openness. She began to get a very bad feeling and was thankful for the service pistol strapped at her hip.
She was running her hands along the earthen wall and moving slowly to her left, when her boot struck an object buried just below the surface of the dirt floor with a heavy clunk. The sound resonated through the enclosed space and the feds looked at her with renewed interest.
Bending down, Sharon dug through the hard-packed earth with her fingers. Less than an inch below the surface she struck something hard and smooth. It felt metallic and cool to the touch. She began scraping away the dirt along the object’s edge, and soon it became clear the item was perfectly round. It was also big.
After a few moments she thought she had removed enough earth that she might be able to pull the object free if she could slide her hands underneath it. With a grunt of effort, Sharon wriggled her fingers, pushing and prodding to get the leverage required to lift the item. By now Ferriss and Cooper had moved close. They loomed over her, watching quietly, neither man offering to help.
Finally she felt as though she had enough of a grip that she might be able to break the earth’s hold. She pulled upward, straining, and after a moment with no result, it suddenly lifted free. It looked perfectly round, about a foot in diameter, and it was heavy.
And it appeared to be solid gold.
Sharon stood in the muted light of the bizarre death-chamber and stared in surprise at her discovery, absolutely baffled as to what it might be.
The two feds stood next to her, both gaping at the circular object. Cooper said quietly, “Hoooly shit, he was here. He was really here,” and then Ferriss glared at him with a look that would have melted steel and he closed his mouth, cringing under his partner’s angry gaze.
Sharon furrowed her brow. “Who was here? Do you know who this belongs to? What is it?”
Ferriss growled, “Can’t say. But that’s evidence in the case we’re working, and it’s coming with us.”
Her reached to take the mysterious metallic object out of Sharon’s hands and she tightened her grip, yanking it away and turning to block the agent with her body. “I don’t think so,” she said tightly. “Whatever it is, it’s evidence in our case, and you’re not touching it until the Paskagankee PD is done with it.”
“Is that right?” said Ferriss. His tone was simultaneously mocking and dangerous, and once again Sharon was thankful she was armed. She had never before had that feeling in the presence of other law enforcement officers. The agent continued, “I’ll just make a call or two and that evidence’ll be out of your hands and clear of this hick town before you know what hit you, little lady.”
“It’s Officer Dupont to you, jackass, and you’re not touching this until I hear otherwise, from someone whose opinion I respect.” She leveled a hard stare at the man and he took an instinctive step backward. His partner didn’t move, though, so Sharon stepped nimbly around him and moved to the ladder, careful to maintain a firm grip on the disputed evidence as she climbed.
She was in her cruiser and driving out of the Ridge Runner lot before the Feds had even exited the pit.
15
Rose Pellerin spit blood out of her mouth and glared up at the man who had hit her. She tried not to think about the clump of bloody hair she had seen stuck to the grip of his beat-up pistol and thanked the good Lord he had seen fit to strike her with an open palm rather than shoot her or hit her with the gun.
“Git up,” the man hissed with the hint of a southwestern accent, “and keep your damn mouth shut or the next time I hit you you’ll wake up with the angels.”
Rose rolled to her hands and knees, ignoring the bath towel and the sprinkling of clothespins she had dropped when she fell. She stood slowly, keeping a wary eye on the stranger, who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. He was dressed in a manner that would have seemed comical had he not just assaulted her. His clothes were ill-fitting; they hung off him like a scarecrow’s outfit. They clearly didn’t belong to him.
But the fit of the man’s attire wasn’t what bothered Rose. Something that looked suspiciously like dried blood was smeared all over the man, splashed liberally on his clothes as well as his exposed skin. It almost looked like he had run through a sprinkler, except it had been spraying blood instead of water.
And the man smelled. He smelled as though he hadn’t showered in decades. The stench of body odor and something unidentifiable wafted off him in waves. Rose felt her eyes begin to water from the awful stench and tried not to gag. Her jaw throbbed where she had been hit, and as she struggled to her feet she worried what might happen next.
She didn’t have to wait long to find out. “I said I want food,” the stranger croaked, “and you’re gonna git me some.”
“Okay,” she agreed, nodding slowly, doing her best to show compliance but not fear. It wasn’t easy. She thought about that awful bloody hair on the man’s weapon and shuddered. “Okay,” she repeated. “Let’s just go inside and see what I can whip up for you, how does that sound?”
“Move,” he said, gesturing toward the open back door with his bloody gun.
Rose didn’t want to turn her back on her attacker but she knew she was being silly. She would be sixty-three years old in two weeks and this disheveled mess of a man looked like he was barely half that. If he wanted to hurt her it wouldn’t matter in the least whether he was standing in front of her, behind her or next to her.
She took one last, quick glance at the man’s face. It was hard and unfeeling. She turned and walked slowly toward the house. Once inside, she pulled a wooden chair away from the small kitchen table and gestured at it with one hand. The man sat without speaking.
“How does an omelet sound?” she asked.
“And coffee.”
“Of course, and coffee. What would you like in your omelet?”
“Everything.”
“Excuse me?”
“Whatever you got, put it in there. I feel like I ain’t eaten in years.”
Rose nodded and turned toward the fridge, risking a sidelong glance at the telephone hanging not three feet away on the wall. The stranger was watching her with his hard gaze from the table and she knew he would be on her before she punched the “9” in 9-1-1. The phone might as well have been in the next county. She tried to control her rising fear and opened the refrigerator door.
***
The pan was sizzling when Rose asked, “Would you like to freshen up before you eat?”
The strange
r stared back with his flat gaze and just said, “Where’s the fire?”
Rose furrowed her brow in confusion. “Fire? What fire?”
“The fire. To cook the food. Where’s the fire?”
“This isn’t a gas stove, it’s electric. There is no fire.” She tried not to grimace as she glanced at the blood and dirt staining the stranger’s clothing and body. “Now, how about washing up?”
The man narrowed his eyes suspiciously but dropped the subject of fires. “Food first,” came the curt reply. “How much longer?”
“It’s almost ready,” Rose answered, wishing she had some rat poison handy. The man might be a lot younger than she was, but he looked terrible, like he might be suffering from some kind of terminal illness. She thought if she could just slow him down a little, she might be able to escape, to rush to her car and get the hell out of here. She would drive straight to the police station and come back with Sheriff Kendall and as many officers as he could muster.
But there was no rat poison.
She tried to think of another option and wondered if she might be able to attack the stranger when he wasn’t expecting it. The skillet currently sautéing vegetables for the omelet was made of cast iron and was also, as a nice bonus, red hot from the stovetop’s burner. If she could manage to crack the man in the skull, there was every reason to believe he would drop like a sack of Aroostook County potatoes.
But she would only get one chance, and he was seated all the way across the kitchen, a distance of over ten feet. The odds of her being able to lift the pan, cross the kitchen floor and then slug him before he could react were so slim as to be laughable. She was old, and as the years had passed she had packed on a few extra pounds – okay, more than few, she thought to herself grimly – and there was little doubt the younger man’s reflexes would be quicker than hers, regardless of how sick he may or may not be.
It wasn’t going to work. Braining her attacker with a frying pan was a satisfying fantasy, but that was all it would ever be. Rose sighed and stirred the ingredients simmering in the pan, then moved to the coffee maker. She dumped coffee into the filter and poured water into the reservoir, then pressed the “Start” button.
A few seconds later, the coffee began to burble through the system, hissing audibly as it dripped into the glass carafe seated on the hotplate. Rose turned back to the stove and then whirled at the sound of feet scrabbling on her vinyl floor tiles.
The stranger was sitting up perfectly straight, the back of his wooden chair pressed against the wall as if he might be trying to force himself through to the other side. His eyes were wide and he stared at the coffeemaker unblinkingly. “What kind of joke is this?” he growled menacingly.
Rose ran her fingers gingerly over the side of her face where the man had hit her. It throbbed incessantly. She didn’t want to be struck again, and the man was making it perfectly clear he was losing patience with her.
But what in the world was so scary about a coffeemaker? The stranger’s frightened gaze suggested he was looking into the face of the devil himself. “I-I’m sorry,” Rose stammered. “I thought you said you wanted coffee. I can turn it off if you’d like…”
She reached for the electrical cord, strung out behind the coffeemaker like a serpent. She would yank it right out of the wall and stop the coffee-brewing process in its tracks. Anything to keep the lunatic calm.
“I do want coffee,” he said, his eyes flicking from the offending appliance to Rose and then back again. He stood and took a tentative step toward her, a development she interpreted as a very bad sign. “Where’s the coffeepot and what the hell is…that thing?” He flicked his head at the Mr. Coffee machine.
“There is no coffeepot. The coffee is brewed inside the coffeemaker and then drips into the glass carafe, where it’s kept warm by the hot plate,” she said gently, wondering what rock this strange man had grown up under. What grown adult in the year 2013 didn’t understand how a coffeemaker worked?
Her response seemed to allay the man’s fears, if only slightly, and he took a step backward. He didn’t sit back down but he was no longer advancing threateningly, either. Rose took a shuddering breath. How am I going to get out of this?
And then the telephone rang.
Rose’s phone was an old, hard plastic wall-mounted model straight out of the 1970’s that had been in perfect working order when she bought the house. She had never had a problem with it over the intervening decades and so had never had occasion to replace it. It was canary-yellow and featured a loud, jangling bell for a ringtone that Rose thought could probably be heard by folks living along the Canadian border.
She froze, fearing the worst. If the dripping of coffee into a glass carafe had spooked the stranger, what would happen now?
She didn’t have to wait long to find out. The man’s entire body jerked as if an electric shock had blasted through his system, and then he stood stiffly, searching desperately for the source of the noise, his long, stringy hair flying in a dirty arc around his head as he tried to look in every direction at once.
The first jangling ring ended and the man stopped moving, and then of course the phone began ringing again. The man stumbled forward now, his eyes bright with panic. He spun Rose around so he was positioned behind her, then encircled her throat with his left arm and began to squeeze, choking off her airway.
“Make it stop,” he growled, his voice shaking.
Rose tried to speak and couldn’t. She tried to breathe and couldn’t. In a matter of seconds, bright blue and black spots began blossoming in her vision.
The telephone rang again.
The man squeezed harder. “MAKE IT STOP!” he shouted, and Rose knew she was about to die.
16
Mike straightened a pile of paperwork and shuffled it into a wooden “Out” box placed at an angle on the corner of his desk. The bureaucratic bullshit generated by even a small-town police department was staggering, and dealing with it had been his least-favorite duty when he was chief the first time around. He considered the irony of being buried under a mountain of it now that he was back on the job, when there was so much real police work to be done, and shook his head glumly.
He pushed his chair out from behind the desk and stood, stretching and yawning, wishing he could sneak in a thirty-minute nap. Going well over twenty-four hours without sleep could catch up to you quickly.
The nap would have to wait, though. He needed to get to the scene of the double murder – was already late, in fact – to check on the progress of the investigation.
He should also be hearing from Sharon soon with the results of her search of the earthen pit out at the Ridge Runner. He was curious to get her take on the two FBI agents who had joined her. Mike had found Sharon Dupont to be, among many other things, a keen judge of human nature. She was likely to provide insights into the feds that he might have missed.
He stepped around his desk and moved toward the closed office door when it opened with a crash, nearly clipping him on the shoulder. Sharon marched in, holding a large, dirt-encrusted, golden-colored disk clutched to her chest. He hadn’t seen her coming through his office windows because he had lowered the blinds in an effort to discourage visitors. There was simply too much work to be done; the welcome-back greetings from officers coming on duty would have to wait until later.
Sharon’s clothes were caked with dust, and the nylon gloves she had worn to conduct her search out on Route 28 – gloves she had still not removed in an effort to avoid contaminating whatever she was holding – had seemingly morphed from their normal baby blue to a dark brown, almost black.
She kicked the office door closed behind her and said, “Those guys are going to…”
The door burst open again, and FBI Special Agents Ferriss and Cooper trooped in, their faces scowling and angry. A vein pulsed in the middle of Cooper’s forehead and Mike hoped the man wouldn’t stroke out right here in the middle of his office.
Sharon thrust the disk toward Mike and then e
veryone was talking excitedly, their voices indecipherable in the confusion. He stepped around them and eased his office door closed, then returned to his original position behind his desk, still without touching the disk.
He stared at all three without saying a word, his gaze moving from Sharon to Ferriss to Cooper and then back to Sharon. Slowly the chaotic stream of babble began to fade, and then it died out completely. “I’m tired,” Mike said, “and it’s already been a long day, so I’m not going to shout over everyone to be heard. Let’s all have a seat and discuss whatever the problem is like the professionals we’re supposed to be, shall we?”
Sharon nodded wordlessly and stepped out of the office, returning a moment later holding the heavy golden disk pressed against her body with one arm while using both hands to drag a pair of chairs across the floor. She plunked the chairs down in front of the desk with a thud and then slid a wheeled chair over from the corner and sat in it, her expression stony. She held the disk in her lap, Mike noticed, covered with both hands as if trying to shield it.
“I uncovered this,” she said, speaking quietly and nodding at the strange-looking circular object, “as part of my investigation. I dug through that site for hours, while these two clowns did little else besides stare at my ass when they thought I wasn’t looking. The minute I pulled this…thing…out of the ground, they suddenly turned into super-sleuths and pulled rank. They want to take possession of it, Mike, but if they do, you know and I know we’ll never see the damned thing again. I spent the morning digging through that death-chamber, I found this evidence – whatever the hell it is - and until we learn its relevance to our investigation, they’re not getting it. They can have it when we’re done with it.”
Wellspring (Paskagankee, Book 3) Page 13